“I never imagined it would happen like this when we left each other on the last day of the trip. » It was when he got off his plane in India, where he lives, that MA, a South Korean, learned the terrible news. The Boeing 737-800 of Jeju Air in South Korea, on board which were 12 members of his family, crashed on the tarmac of Muan airport on Sunday.
“I am heartbroken,” he told the Yonhap news agency, which chose to give only his initials. The man, who works for a South Korean branch in India, had joined 12 family members – three relatives and nine extended family members – for a vacation in Bangkok, Thailand. A group trip, organized by a company, in which five other South Koreans, from the town of Mokpo, also participated.
Sunday, December 29, at Bangkok airport, MA said goodbye to his family, before boarding a plane for India, without knowing that he would never see them again. “It was a group trip of 18 people (…) I am the only one to have survived,” lamented MA, whose grandfather was the oldest of the 181 passengers.
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Several families decimated
MA’s family is not the only one to have been decimated by the crash. Five members of the same family, spread over three generations, were killed in the crash of the Jeju Air Boeing 737-800, a man in his sixties told the Yonhap news agency, which reported lost his sister-in-law, his daughter, his son-in-law and the couple’s children.
Another family, made up of five people including a father, a son, a son-in-law and two grandchildren, was on board the plane. Originally from Jindo province, they went to Bangkok together, according to Yonhap. Eight retired civil servants from Hwasun district in southern South Korea, who had gone on vacation together, were also on the plane.
Two sisters, civil servants in the town of Mokpo, were also among the passengers. Like every year, they organized a family trip with their children.
Victims aged 3 to 80
Sunday, December 29, the Boeing 737-800 of the South Korean company Jeju Air, coming from Bangkok (Thailand), hit a wall and burst into flames after landing on its belly at Muan airport, in the south -western South Korea. Of the 181 passengers – 175 travelers and six crew members – only two people survived, Lee Im, a 33-year-old steward, and Koo Mo-soo, a 25-year-old flight attendant.
With the exception of two Thais, the passengers are all South Koreans who had gone to Bangkok for the end-of-year holidays, according to authorities. Most of them had booked the same ticket, one way from Muan to Bangkok on December 25 at 8:50 p.m. and a return in the morning on December 29.
According to authorities, the youngest passenger was a little boy, aged three, and the oldest, MA’s grandfather, aged 80. Among the 179 victims, five children under ten years old and nine adolescents died.
